Yahoo News explains: Is collusion a crime?

“No collusion” — it’s a defense President Trump has used against allegations that his campaign worked with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election.

Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani recently offered up this argument on Fox & Friends: “I’ve been sitting here looking in that federal code trying to find collusion as a crime.” He added, “It’s not — collusion is not a crime.”

Trump echoed his lawyer’s argument on Twitter.

Collusion is not a crime, but that doesn’t matter because there was No Collusion (except by Crooked Hillary and the Democrats)!

It’s true that in the U.S. legal code there is no crime called “collusion.”

So, is Trump off the hook in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation?

Not exactly.

While collusion isn’t a crime, that’s not a question the investigation is asking. This was pointed out during a CNN town hall by former FBI Director James Comey, who said, “The question that we would look at as a counterintelligence agency is, are any Americans conspiring, which is a crime defined by the U.S. code, with a foreign government to commit any offenses against the United States or to defraud the United States?”